Last week, the German Federal Umweltbundesamt (UBA), Germany’s version of the EPA, issued a one-sided alarmist pamphlet that attempts to declare the climate debate over and attacks prominent skeptics.

Controversial 123-page pamphlet…in it the German Federal Environment Agency (UBA) declares climate debate over and names and portrays skeptics as “spreaders of half-truths and misinformation”.

In the pamphlet, he German government UBA specifically singles out, identifies, targets and attacks US and German skeptics, thus sparking outrage.

Some of the Americans targeted include scientists Fred Singer, Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon, Frederick Seitz, Pat Michaels, John Christy, Ross McKitrick and conservative think-tank Heartland Institute. The German targets include European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), Fritz Vahrenholt, and Sebastian Lüning, as well as journalists and publicists Dirk Maxeiner and Michael Miersch, and film-maker / publicist Günter Ederer, and national newspaper Die Welt.

The pamphlet is a product of official state action in which in one sense the claims that contradict the ‘scientific consensus’ made by ‘climate change skeptics’ (p. 110) are polemicized. Even the ZDF public television website ‘heute.de’ diagnosed it as ‘official state defamation’. This makes the matter legally questionable.”

Koch then explains that the government is allowed to participate and take a position on the climate issue, but adds:

Strange however that a government office is attempting to bindingly specify the state of knowledge in a scientific question. That is the job of a scientist. Even more it is neither scientifically or legally appropriate if scientific truths – and thus ultimately only the current state of the error – are announced with official authority.

Deciding scientific controversies is no duty of the state. The attempt we have here by the Environment Agency to decide a scientific controversy is in this form unique.”

And we may also add that it is also not the duty of a handful of scientists to decide political controversies…at least not in democratic societies.

The first name rang a bell from the Desertec debacle so I dug up some olde files which said that he was “Harry Lehmann, Dipl.-Phys.” in 2003 … from where (IIRC) it’s a long road to a Dr.. A biography of the Lehmann is on-hand which shows little opportunity to gain a doctorate in a scientific field. The bio. does however “lay claim” to part of Rubbia’s Nobel Prize in 1984.

Lehmann is NOT a climate scientist.

Dr. Klaus Müschen appears to be a glorified electrician and social scientist. For 7 years he was an assistant instructor at Hamburg Uni. He spent a long time in Berlin, squandering tax and rate-payers’ money. Doesn’t make him a climate scientist.

Dr. Steffi Richter appears to have gained a Doctorate in philosophy of Teleology in the Soviet block. Not a climate scientist.

I can’t find anything outside of UBA to definitively identify Dr. Claudia Mäder’s area of expertise let alone discover where she got her gongs.

I’m used to easily finding where and in what subject people gained their degrees and higher qualifications when looking at the bio of their employer’s web site. UBA doesn’t seem to have that information.

Germany seems to be pretty strict on people pretending to have “titles”; even raiding people’s homes and offices if they joke about it.

Just doesn’t seem right. What’s strange is how klimaretter and Die Zeit got mentioned prominenently in the pamphlet. I found the pamphlet’s overall tone to be very similar to what you find at klimaretter and from Rahmstorf. I suspect there’s much more behind the pamphlet than the 4 mentioned authors.

A relationships diagram of UBA and PIK needs to be established.
That takes (considerable) time. The little-known authors’ previous “work” needs to be identified and co-authors and their respective co-authors in other works identified.

The fact that the tone of the pamphlet is PIK-like may be simply down to the fact that none of the authors seems to have a scientific appreciation of what they are writing about; that they are parroting the official line as dictated by PIK. (Reminiscent of cold-war rhetoric in the GDR where the people had to say the right things in a formulaic manner in order to survive.) UBA’s little orange crusade pamphlet indicates that they firmly believe their own bullsh!t.

Desertec debacle? Just this Monday I listened to DW-KULTRA, eh, sorry, Deutschlandradio Kultur and they interviewed a Dutch engineer who told about his vision of making solar energy in the desert work… yes, he is the desertec employee who currently builds a plant in Marocco…

This Marocco project BTW is financed by the state-owned (tax payer funded) KfW bank; and it will deliver electricity mostly to Marocco and partly to Spain IF they manage to build a transmission line. Nothing of the energy will arrive in Germany.

Just so you know; we are long past the point where we even pretend that.

[…] propaganda arm for the administration. Chilling really. Especially when you consider that German authorities seem to be practicing the same brand of thought control (again?!). Last week that country’s version of the EPA issued an alarmist pamphlet ~ […]